Facing the Flag eBook

Why has he severed himself from the world? What
has been his past? If, as I suspect, this name
of d’Artigas and this title of Count are assumed,
what motive has he for hiding his identity? Has
he been banished, is he an outcast of society that
he should have selected this place above all others?
Am I not in the power of an evildoer anxious to ensure
impunity for his crimes and to defy the law by seeking
refuge in this undiscoverable burrow? I have the
right of supposing anything in the case of this suspicious
foreigner, and I exercise it.

Then the question to which I have never been able
to suggest a satisfactory answer once more surges
into my mind. Why was Thomas Roch abducted from
Healthful House in the manner already fully described?
Does the Count d’Artigas hope to force from him
the secret of his fulgurator with a view to utilizing
it for the defence of Back Cup in case his retreat
should by chance be discovered? Hardly. It
would be easy enough to starve the gang out of Back
Cup, by preventing the tug from supplying them with
provisions. On the other hand, the schooner could
never break through the investing lines, and if she
did her description would be known in every port.
In this event, of what possible use would Thomas Roch’s
invention be to the Count d’Artigas Decidedly,
I cannot understand it!

About seven o’clock in the morning I jump out
of bed. If I am a prisoner in the cavern I am
at least not imprisoned in my grotto cell. The
door yields when I turn the handle and push against
it, and I walk out.

Thirty yards in front of me is a rocky plane, forming
a sort of quay that extends to right and left.
Several sailors of the Ebba are engaged in
landing bales and stores from the interior of the tug,
which lays alongside a little stone jetty.

A dim light to which my eyes soon grow accustomed
envelops the cavern and comes from a hole in the centre
of the roof, through which the blue sky can be seen.

“It is from that hole that the smoke which can
be seen for such a distance issues,” I say to
myself, and this discovery suggests a whole series
of reflections.

Back Cup, then, is not a volcano, as was supposed—­as
I supposed myself. The flames that were seen
a few years ago, and the columns of smoke that still
rise were and are produced artificially. The
detonations and rumblings that so alarmed the Bermudan
fishers were not caused by the internal workings of
nature. These various phenomena were fictitious.
They manifested themselves at the mere will of the
owner of the island, who wanted to scare away the inhabitants
who resided on the coast. He succeeded, this
Count d’Artigas, and remains the sole and undisputed
monarch of the mountain. By exploding gunpowder,
and burning seaweed swept up in inexhaustible quantities
by the ocean, he has been able to simulate a volcano
upon the point of eruption and effectually scare would-be
settlers away!